Labial Articulation Patterns Associated with Segmental Features and Syllable Structure in English

Abstract

Abstract The purpose of the work described here was to relate different types of phonological categories – like phonemic distinctive features and syllable boundaries – with articulatory parameters for lip and jaw height. The analysis is based on data for 2 talkers of American English, using the University of Tokyo X-ray microbeam system. We studied the articulatory realization of linguistic contrasts in syllable boundary location for the intervocalic labial stop consonant /p/ and the articulatory realization of intervocalic /p/ in the environment of phonemically different vowels. The /p/s in contrasts associated with the phonemic vowel environment (e. g., /p/ in /ipi/ versus /apa/) were realized in articulation by a constant lip pellet position, implemented by an inverse relation between jaw height and lip articulator height. The syllable structure contrasts (e. g., syllable-initial /p/ versus syllable-final /p/) were realized by jaw height differences, without any lip articulator difference. These results can be accounted for by describing the observable lip pellet position for /p/ as a function of two independent variables: a constant lip pellet goal, at the level of segmental vowel environment, plus a jaw height for a particular syllable structure.